JOHN CICHOWSKI, Staff Writer The Record (Bergen County, NJ) 11-04-1993 MACINNES SAVORS RARE WIN IN MORRIS -- DEMOCRATS SEE BOOST FOR PARTY By JOHN CICHOWSKI, Staff Writer Date: 11-04-1993, Thursday Section: NEWS Edition: All Editions -- 3 Star, 2 Star P, 2 Star...

Leila MacInnes was born the 13th child in a farming family in Bardsville, Ontario (Bracebridge). Through Knox Church, Bracebridge, she came to know and love Gordon MacInnes, the minister's son. During their 53 years of marriage, Leila helped Gordon change career direction from...

City of Spades is MacInnes's third novel, but his first good one. His To the Victors the Spoils was about the European war and, unfortunately, contrived to communicate the boredom of war in a way that the author did not perhaps intend. His next, June in her Spring, a touching, but slight, account of young love blighted in philistine Australia, reads, although it was published second, like the classic first novel of adolescent agony. Consequently, when City of Spades appeared, one greeted it with a do...

[The] fiction of Colin MacInnes has remained virtually unknown on this side of the Atlantic. The three novels that make up [The London Novels of Colin MacInnes], and which have taken about a decade to cross the big divide, may change all that. Many an American reader, discovering the humanity and vitality of these explorations of the London scene, will regret having had to wait so long for them. But the delay serves one useful purpose: The passage of time emphasizes the unusual quality of these novels. They...

The city of which Mr. MacInnes writes [in City of Spades] is London and the Spades are its Coloured inhabitants…. Mr. MacInnes tells his story through his two principal characters, Montgomery Pew, a genially irresponsible young man who has drifted briefly into the job of Assistant Welfare Officer at the Colonial Office, and Johnny Macdonald Fortune, his earliest client, a newly arrived student from Lagos of compelling charm and magnificent physique. The technical difficulties of constructing a story ...